This PI will study the physical and information-theoretic constraints that underline computation and computing machines. For the educational component of the CAREER award, her will develop a new course, entitled `Computation and Computing Machines,` which will challenge students to consider the general notion of a computing machine. First will introduce the requisite concepts in quantum physics, biology, integrated-circuit technology, information theory, and thermodynamics. Using these concepts, He will the attributes and the Stations of present-day digital computers. He will conclude by considering the foundations and promise of neurally inspired, quantum, and DNA computers. His research goal is to build silicon integrated circuits that employ the computational principles used in nervous tissue. he has have already developed, in a standard CMOS process, a family of single-transistor devices called synapse transistors; these devices, like neural synapses, implement long-term analog memory, allow bi-directional memory updates, and learn from an input signs without interrupting the ongoing computation. Although believe that a single device cannot model the complex behavior of a neural synapse completely, my synapse transistors do implement a local learning function. He will model in silicon, the adaptive and learning behavior of living organisms, His approach is bottom-up: He will begin by fabricating synapse-transistor arrays that mimic some of the attributes of nervous tissue, including high device density, low power consumption, panel computation, and local weight adaptation, and he will investigate local learning in these arrays. He will also develop circuits that model and axonal delays, and learn the delay values locally. He will then use these arrays and delay circuits to investigate action-potential-based computation in silicon. His future research will use the knowledge and devices gained under the CAREER award to construct large scale systems that, by using the computational and adaptive properties of nervous tissue, find good solutions to ill-posed problems.
